Trivia (13)

Hirokazu Kore-eda said that he developed the story for Shoplifters when considering his earlier film Like Father, Like Son (2013), with the question "what makes a family?" He had been considering a film exploring this question for 10 years before making Shoplifters.

Director Hirokazu Kore-eda said that he developed the story for Shoplifters when considering his earlier film Like Father, like Son, with the question "what makes a family"? He had been considering a film exploring this question for 10 years before making Shoplifters. Kore-eda described it as his "socially conscious" film. With this story, Kore-eda said he did not want the perspective to be from only a few individual characters, but to capture "the family within the society", a "wide point of view" in the vein of his 2004 film Nobody Knows. He set his story in Tokyo and was also influenced by the Japanese Recession, including media reports of how people lived in poverty and of shoplifting. To research the project, Kore-eda toured an orphanage and wrote a scene inspired by a girl there who read from Swimmy by Leo Lionni.

The film premiered on 13 May 2018 at the Cannes Film Festival, where it went on to win the Palme d'Or. Shoplifters won the Asia Pacific Screen Award for Best Feature Film, and is nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film.